Pod Insights The Ezra Klein Show Kamala Harris Wants to Win About this episode On Thursday night, Kamala Harris reintroduced herself to America. And by the standards of Democratic convention speeches, this one was pretty unusual. In this conversation I’m joined by my editor, Aaron Retica, to discuss what Harris’s speech reveals about the candidate, the campaign she’s going to run and how she believes she can win in November.
Mentioned:
The Truths We Hold by Kamala Harris
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You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Jack McCordick. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Ezra Klein? From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.
0:24 Ezra Klein? It is Thursday, August 22nd. We are just back from the arena having watched Kamala Harris accept Democratic nomination for president. She gave a speech I think was quite extraordinary, and also quite unusual by the standards of recent Democratic Convention speeches. She did quite a lot, I think, to define herself to the country, but also to define what kind of campaign she's going to run, what her campaign's theory of this election and the victory in it would be. I'm joined here by my revered editor, Aaron Reddick. Aaron, welcome back to the show.
0:57 Aaron Retica? Thanks. Let's cast our minds back to the Paleolithic era, by which I mean, you know, July, and just stop for a second and talk about the Republican Convention and where things seemed while that was happening. And then we're going to, of course, turn to the events this weekend, particularly Kamala's speech tonight. How would you contrast, first, before we get into the nitty gritty of what she said, the overall feeling of the Republican Convention when it looked to the Republicans like they were going to win, and this week in Chicago?
1:32 Ezra Klein? Republicans ran a convention like they had already won, and Democrats ran a convention like they wanted to win. Everybody I talked to there, I was not myself in Milwaukee, said this. The dominant mood at the Republican Convention was it was like the victory night party, right? That's what Tim Alberta said on the show from The Atlantic. And I think you saw that in Donald Trump's speech. You also saw that, by the way, in Donald Trump's choice of J.D. Vance, which I think has proven to be unwise. But you saw it in his speech that night. It was self-indulgent. It was first, and do remember the context,
2:12 Ezra Klein? he had just suffered an assassination attempt. It was a long retelling of that, followed by an extremely long, all over the place, unfocused, rally-like performance by Trump.
2:29 Ezra Klein? What the convention was not, and what Trump's performance in particular was not, was aimed at voters he needed to persuade. You could not look at that speech and say, well, Donald Trump sat down with La Civita and Wiles and thought through who it was that he needed to win over, who he had not yet won over, and decided what it was he needed to say to them. By contrast, that is exactly what Kamala Harris's speech was. Kamala Harris's speech was reverse engineered from their theory of who it is they needed to win. We could talk about the way she introduced herself, which is very much putting herself
3:12 Ezra Klein? in the narrative of immigrant stories. But if you think about what she promised at that speech, what she actually said she was going to do, is a quite conservative speech. She is going to restore Roe, the protections for reproductive freedom, as she put it. And she's going to pass a quite conservative bipartisan border bill that was negotiated with James Langford of Oklahoma. I cannot remember a speech from a Democrat at a convention that in its promises, that in its imagery, that in its story, was as fundamentally conservative. And I don't mean that in the sort of modern Republican Party movement term.
3:57 Ezra Klein? I mean that in the sort of original term as this one.
4:01 Aaron Retica? I'm going to push back on that a little bit later because I think there were a lot of cultural, I hate to use this word, but cultural signifiers that were there for people who wanted to see them. But let's first talk about, she started with a love story and an immigrant story. When you get a chance to tell your story the way you want to tell it, which is what happens at these conventions, right? You reveal a lot about yourself, even though, you know, people are always talking about, oh, you reveal yourself so much under pressure. But when you have the control over the story, it's actually very revealing. So, as you said a minute ago, People don't know her that well. What did she tell us about herself? Not necessarily that it was new, but how did she configure it so that we would think about her differently?
4:47 Ezra Klein? The core thread of her biography, in her speech and in her sister Maya Harris's speech, was her mother. And she wrapped herself in, I would say, the sort of dual threads of, one, her mother's work ethic.
5:07 Kamala Harris? Before she could finally afford to buy a home, she rented a small apartment in the East Bay. In the Bay, in the Bay, you either live in the hills or the flatlands. We lived in the flats. A beautiful, working-class neighborhood of firefighters, nurses, and construction workers, all who tended their lawns with pride.
5:39 Ezra Klein? She talked about her mother having a tight budget. She talked about the work her mother did, but she also talked about her mother, and for that matter, her father's, commitment to civil rights, her mother's activism, her mother's intolerance for complaint.
5:55 Kamala Harris? My mother was a brilliant, five-foot-tall, brown woman with an accent. And as the eldest child, as the eldest child, I saw how the world would sometimes treat her. But my mother never lost her cool. She was tough, courageous, a trailblazer in the fight for women's health. And she taught Maya and me a lesson that Michelle mentioned the other night. She taught us to never complain about injustice, but do something about it. Do something about it.
6:39 Kamala Harris? That was my mother. And she taught us, and she always, she also taught us, and she also taught us, "And never do anything half-assed." And that is a direct quote.
6:55 Ezra Klein? I am the son of an immigrant. Me too. If you have any of that in you, this was very recognizable, the emphasis on hard work. There was a lot of, I thought, beauty in it. And, you know, it was an Oakland, California of a different time that she was describing. And I was just reading the book she released for her 2020 campaign. And she describes her upbringing in that book in a lot more detail. And she talks a lot about what was clearly the sort of Bay Area politics that her family was involved in. She talks about, really lovely sounding, but
7:34 Ezra Klein? if you know that area, sort of utopian and communal, sort of arrangements and activist spaces, right? You know, if, I found it very recognizable, but that was not the version of it, really, that she told tonight. The version of it she told tonight, introducing herself to the American people who know her but don't know her, was the extremely hardworking daughter of socially committed immigrants, who was lit by injustice she saw around her. She told a story she often tells. It's quite moving.
8:10 Kamala Harris? You see, when I was in high school, I started to notice something about my best friend, Wanda. She was sad at school. And there were times she didn't want to go home. So one day, I asked if everything was all right. And she confided in me that she was being sexually abused by her stepfather. And I immediately told her she had to come stay with us, and she did. This is one of the reasons I became a prosecutor, to protect people like Wanda, because I believe everyone has a right to safety, to dignity, and to justice.
8:57 Aaron Retica? Let's talk about the prosecutor aspect of all this. Throughout the week, they've really been hammering that home. She's been talking a lot about it on the road. When she ran in 2020, she didn't get to 2020, in part because she was a prosecutor and the idea of Kamala as a cop. How much do you think that she is now oddly freed by the chance to talk about herself as a law and order person? You used the word conservative before, but it almost seemed like moving into that framework, which might seem restrictive, actually was kind of liberating for her.
9:38 Ezra Klein? I think that's right. It's true that if your whole political experience, everything you have done, the person you have made yourself into, is suddenly judged politically lethal, and yet people still want you to run for office? That's going to be a very hard problem to solve. In 2020, she couldn't solve it because there wasn't actually a solution. Now, there is a solution, which is that it's not a problem anymore and in fact is an asset. And so you see her up there with a tremendous amount of natural ease, right?
10:18 Ezra Klein? You see much more of the person that when her star was initially rising, people were looking for. I'll say one more thing on this because it had occurred to me while reading her book, which is one way that Harris is very different than Obama and different than what we sometimes see in democratic politics and liberal politics, is that a lot of people get into politics as liberals, get into it to confront power. Barack Obama was famously a community organizer, organizing people to confront power.
10:54 Ezra Klein? Harris, what she did was become power. She didn't become a public defender. She became a prosecutor. She didn't go work for a legal nonprofit. She became a prosecutor. And she tells a story very early in this book about, I think it was when she was an intern in the prosecutor's office. There was a case coming and, or at least a proceeding coming. And she was like pushing to get the judge back because this woman who was sort of involved in this, but not necessarily at the center of it, if the judge wouldn't come back for like five minutes.
11:28 Aaron Retica? This is a weekend story, right?
11:30 Ezra Klein? She would be held all weekend and she probably had kids. And, and she talks about realizing just how important it was that you could use power compassionately. And so I think something you see with Harris, which is not true for all kinds of different people, is she's quite comfortable in the position of being the person who wields power. That's what she actually intended to do. She wasn't there to, like, her rise and her, the way she got herself involved in politics was not as somebody trying to compassionately challenge the power structure. It was somebody trying to become the power structure from a compassionate place.
12:08 Aaron Retica? So she is the first presidential candidate on the Democratic side from California ever. She presented a kind of California story today and she's presenting a California that is not the dystopian hell that the right wing media, that Trump himself, and really quite a lot of people are trying to push. Now, you're of course, yourself a product of California. And I was thinking a lot tonight about how here is a vision of California as the leading light in the United States, right? As the future. She didn't talk a ton about that, but I was feeling it kind of like the sunniness, like
12:52 Aaron Retica? she's not Reagan, obviously, but like there was a Reagan-esque element to it and they've been talking endlessly about joy. And I was wondering what you thought about that presentation, right? What that does politically and also just, again, in terms of making Harris comfortable with. The job that she's now chosen to do.
13:12 Ezra Klein? I'm not sure that as much as I love my home state, I think we have a monopoly on joy, on happiness, on that kind of politics of pleasure even. But I do think there's something important about the California roots. And you could see it in a couple of ways tonight. One is it California in general, and here, you know, I'm talking specifically about Los Angeles, but really specifically about San Francisco. The politics of San Francisco from the outside that you get on Fox News are not the politics on the inside. San Francisco's politics have a very core tension to them, which is that San Francisco is a very, very, very tolerant place. That's what Fox News is getting at.
13:54 Ezra Klein? That is constantly consumed by political anger over the tolerated level of disorder.
14:03 Ezra Klein? And not San Francisco, but Oakland, which is where Harris grew up, has been at times and has been in recent times too, a very violent place. And politicians who come up through San Francisco are very liberal on one level, but they also have to be able to manage the absolute fury that defines San Francisco politics towards the level of disorder around them, the level of crime around them. More recently, towards the level of housing in affordability around them. And you saw Harris tonight get huge, huge, huge applause for calling for building more homes, right?
14:47 Ezra Klein? The Yimby-ization of the Democratic Party.
14:49 Aaron Retica? Right, which Barack Obama also talked about.
14:51 Ezra Klein? But this is coming through California, right? The sort of Yimby movement that has influenced Democratic Party is a San Francisco-based movement.
14:59 Aaron Retica? Let's tell people what Yimby is, I think.
15:00 Ezra Klein? Yes, in my backyard. This is my podcast. They know what Yimby is.
15:04 Aaron Retica? Yeah, you never know. Someone might be listening who hasn't listened before.
15:06 Ezra Klein? But so I think all that was there. But what I do think is sort of important is that on the one hand, the union you see in a politician like Harris, and I think is maybe not only Californian, but reads to me as distinctively Californian, and you see a version of it, by the way, in Gavin Newsom too, is this mixture of quite liberal, particularly in its symbolic politics.
15:32 Ezra Klein? But quite intolerant of disorder, quite aware of the anger that disorder, crime, lawlessness creates in the population. That is the particular strain of politics that she comes up in. When she runs for attorney general in California, she runs against a quite popular Republican from Los Angeles. And it's a very, very, very close race. But he was popular because he was known as a strong law and order candidate. The way she knocked off an incumbent in San Francisco and then ran against this popular Republican from Los Angeles was by arguing that she was going to be a tougher and more
16:17 Ezra Klein? effective prosecutor, district attorney, attorney general than they were. So this is a very natural politics for her, which I think is then something she's bringing to the way she's talking here about foreign policy and the way she's talking here about Donald Trump. Kamala Harris is a candidate, a politician, who knows both the importance of looking strong and knows how to perform looking strong. And I think you saw both tonight.
16:49 Aaron Retica? You've talked a couple of times now about her being, in some sense, conservative with this speech. And it's already being applauded by the kind of Democratic analysts who want the party to swing toward the center. What was her projected electorate from the speech? And talk a little bit about how she did that.
17:09 Ezra Klein? So it's worth thinking about who preceded her on the stage. You had, a little bit to my surprise, Leon Panetta, the politician living who is closest to what Leo McGary was on the West Wing.
17:25 Ezra Klein? Leon Panetta, former congressman, important member of the Clinton administration, I believe a budget director for a period, later, though, a secretary of defense. And Leon Panetta gives a searing speech about Donald Trump's disrespect to the troops, to veterans, to our allies.
17:45 Speaker 03 Look, Donald Trump does not understand the world.
17:52 Speaker 04 And he does not understand the service and sacrifice of our military. Our fallen veterans are not suckers. They are not losers. They are our heroes.
18:11 Ezra Klein? You also have Adam Kinzinger, former Republican congressman. He's become a searing critic of Donald Trump and sort of gives a speech welcoming Republicans into the patriotic embrace of the Democratic Party, saying, you know, there are things that are beyond partisanship.
18:27 Speaker 05 I've learned something about the Democratic Party, and I want to let my fellow Republicans in on the secret. The Democrats are as patriotic as us.
18:45 Speaker 05 They love this country just as much as we do.
18:52 Ezra Klein? You have Mike Harris, who's, of course, Kamala Harris's sister. It's a more sort of biographical speech. And you have Roy Cooper of North Carolina, who talks about Harris's toughness in negotiating with the banks.
19:06 Speaker 04 She went toe to toe with some of the world's most powerful executives, and she refused to give in. Let me tell you, this was a huge risk, but she knew it was a risk worth taking. That's Kamala. And we all know what happened. The banks caved. That $4 billion for California families became $20 billion.
19:36 Ezra Klein? And so first, you had this sort of run-up that was about foreign policy, reaching out to Republicans, and a kind of nonpartisan populism.
19:47 Ezra Klein? And then you get the speech, which, beyond its biographical dimensions, when you think about what the Democratic Party wants to do, what it runs on, what it is trying to win power to achieve, what is it on that huge laundry list of things Democrats want? What did she say about climate in this speech? Not a lot. Basically, nothing. What did she say about healthcare? I mean, she touched it, but for like a second. Did she promise a universal childcare policy? No. Universal pre-K? No. There are a million things Democrats promise and care about and that she cares about,
20:29 Ezra Klein? that if she gets a governing trifecta, I think she will try to do. But this speech did not really spend time on any of that. It was about shoring up what might have been her weaknesses. The border. You saw her pushing the bipartisan border bill, not comprehensive immigration reform, right? She gave an immigrant story, but the immigration policy she offered was tightening the border and the asylum system.
20:59 Kamala Harris? Well, I refuse to play politics with our security. And here is my pledge to you. As president, I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that he killed, and I will sign it into law.
21:17 Ezra Klein? She showed a lot of steel on foreign policy. The message that she was offering on foreign policy was she was tough.
21:22 Kamala Harris? I will not cozy up to tyrants and dictators like Kim Jong Un, who are rooting for Trump, who are rooting for Trump.
21:32 Ezra Klein? She had a very, I think, again, effective line, that dictators understand that Donald Trump is easily manipulated and easily flattered, but that she was going to stand with Ukraine and stand with our allies and stand against autocrats.
21:47 Kamala Harris? accountable because he wants to be an autocrat himself.
21:53 Kamala Harris? And as president, I will never waver in defense of America's security and ideals because in the enduring struggle between democracy and tyranny, I know where I stand and I know where the United States belongs.
22:13 Ezra Klein? And you had her pushing for the restoration of, she wasn't super specific about what this bill would include, but the restoration of reproductive rights, of reproductive freedom. There was just nothing in there that was part of the liberal list beyond, again, restoring Roe, but that is going back to where we were a couple of years ago. It's not going to somewhere the country has not yet been. When you think about how she ran in 2020, having endorsed Medicare for All and then come out with this slightly triangulated but very expansive Medicare expansion plan. When you think about the immigration politics of that year, right,
22:54 Ezra Klein? where the Democratic Party is, most of the people on that stage, including her, but not Joe Biden, are saying they would decriminalize border crossing. She was not doing any work to get liberals excited by offering a list of the big things she would do that they've always wanted done. She was doing work to say to somebody who, you know, maybe is, bleeds a little right, maybe doesn't like Joe Biden that much actually, but is sort of uncomfortable with Donald Trump. She was working to make herself a safe home for them.
23:34 Aaron Retica? She used an interesting word talking about Trump. She said he was unserious and then went on to talk about all the serious consequences of his unseriousness. She talked about obviously respecting the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power. Do you think that that depiction of Trump is a more effective way of framing him as her opponent?
23:59 Ezra Klein? She had a lot of framings of Trump and I thought that one was effective. And one of the things I thought was interesting throughout the week of the convention was that both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama's speeches, in their own ways, I thought were arguments to Kamala Harris and the rising generation of the Democratic Party about how to run against Donald Trump. So I thought one of the best lines of the convention was Bill Clinton's line, "Don't count Donald Trump's lies, count his eyes." Clinton's argument there being, "Stop obsessing over fact-checking Donald Trump. The point of Donald Trump is he's a self-centered narcissist who's going to line his own pockets and will
24:42 Ezra Klein? care for you not at all." And Harris picked up the exact same theme at real length. She didn't attack Donald Trump as a liar, or not primarily, or just a liar. She attacked him as self-centered. Both Obama and Clinton made a point of talking about how to talk to and reach out to voters who don't agree with you. And she definitely made a point in the speech of talking about, and this is cliche in American politics, but it's not a cliche that you heard Donald Trump spending a lot of time on, about being a president for all Americans, about putting country first. Again, here an echo of Adam Kinzinger.
25:17 Kamala Harris? And let me say, I know there are people of various political views watching tonight. And I want you to know, I promise to be a president for all Americans. You can always trust me to put country above party and self, to hold sacred America's fundamental principles, from the rule of law, to free and fair elections, to the peaceful transfer of power.
25:52 Ezra Klein? One thing that I thought was important about the speech is that she left vibes for TikTok. There's been such an explosion of vibe around her. Coconut tree memes. Right, the endless memes. Weird from Tim Walz, brat, right? She didn't play with any of that here. She didn't even allude to any of that. There wasn't a joke about J D Vance and the couch. One of the things that I had heard people worry about, because it was connected to worries they had about her in the past, was that they would mistake the enthusiasm they were getting online for what you needed to do to win over 53 year old suburbanites in Pennsylvania.
26:37 Ezra Klein? And she just didn't. Whether they're right about what wins those voters over, I don't know. I've never won an election in Pennsylvania or in Wisconsin or anywhere else. But this was not a campaign that was, so to speak, high on its own digital supply. It was not mistaking engagement for what you need to do to actually achieve persuasion. It was instead, assuming, and I think correctly, that the engagement, enthusiasm, the vibes it was getting on the left, actually gave her room to not pander or even worry all
27:20 Ezra Klein? that much about the left or even about liberals, but to aim her appeal at, you could call them moderates, but I would call them sort of just less political and less bought in voters. I do think the one place that there is an important divergence from that is on Israel and Gaza, where I thought this is a very, not just effective part of the speech, but I thought just substantively from where I sit, an important and very well done part of the speech. Within the administration, she is to Joe Biden's left on this issue. She's not on the left on this issue, right? She's a two-state solution person. She's, but she spoke about both the horrors of October 7th.
28:08 Ezra Klein? And what Hamas has done and represents quite eloquently.
28:13 Kamala Harris? And let me be clear, I will always stand up for Israel's right to defend itself. And I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself. Because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that a terrorist organization called Hamas caused on October 7.
28:41 Kamala Harris? Including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival.
28:50 Ezra Klein? But also spoke about the devastation in Gaza and the need to take the Palestinian right to self-determination and safety as seriously as the Israeli right to security. I'm not saying Joe Biden doesn't believe it, but when he talks about it, you don't feel it. And when she did, you could feel it.
29:10 Kamala Harris? What has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost.
29:21 Kamala Harris? Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking. President Biden and I are working to end this war such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.
29:57 Aaron Retica? Yeah, where we were sitting. With, you know, people who would not necessarily seem to be super interested in that issue. When she was talking about it, people were really into it, right? They were talking back to her and with her as she went through that, which I thought was very interesting.
30:16 Ezra Klein? She announced no break with administration policy here, and it felt like a complete break with the administration. And I think it actually is, in a way, because just the truth is that Joe Biden's heart is very deeply with Israel. And I think the criticism of him, I'm not saying he does not care about Palestinians or Palestinian lives, but his fundamental identification is with Israel and Israel's security. And you could feel in this that Harris is more balanced than he is, that she was where she really is. I don't know. I don't know her that well.
30:56 Aaron Retica? She may also just be reading the party better, right?
30:59 Ezra Klein? But it is, from everything, I mean, this is based on some reporting, but she is in a different place than him. I think she does feel this differently. I think it does read to her differently for a lot of different reasons. Not least of them, again, that her mother's an Indian immigrant. The rest of the world looks at this very differently. I'm not saying this was a huge topic in her house growing up, but to the degree that Joe Biden has felt himself wrapped in the Israeli story, it's possible she just does not, does not have that identification. And usually in American policy, Israeli security is a non-negotiable. And Palestinian security or self-determination is completely negotiable. It's contingent. And that is not how, I don't know what her policy will be in office, because
31:44 Ezra Klein? there's a whole state apparatus, right?
31:46 Aaron Retica? And she has to win.
31:47 Ezra Klein? And a Congress, and she has to win. But that is not how she presented it. It felt different.
31:53 Aaron Retica? It did not feel like lip service to the two-state solution as it does with so many politicians. I mean, if you're, I mean, I'm a little older than you. If you're my age, seeing any politician.
32:06 Aaron Retica? Talk with compassion about the Palestinians and about a Palestinian state and that they deserve it, that it's not just a subset of what Israel needs.
32:18 Ezra Klein? In addition to, I think, her trying to bridge a divide a lot of people feel inside themselves and that exists in her own party, she was also trying to show that she had a strong perspective that she would forcefully pursue. She was like trying to clear that bar of could you imagine her in the commander in chief role? Could you imagine, you know, the aides coming to her to say that the war had just expanded, right? She had a whole section on Iran and, you know, Madam President, what do you want to do? She was trying to help people imagine her into that situation room.
32:51 Aaron Retica? It was interesting also because if you think that part of what's needed is some kind of like Metternich type solution where everyone, you know, all the top leaders or most of them go to Cyprus and they just stay there until they figure it out, she kind of gave the feeling that that was something she might push.
33:09 Ezra Klein? Yeah, look, like, I know that Joe Biden is working hard for a ceasefire.
33:14 Aaron Retica? Right.
33:17 Ezra Klein? I have really very complicated feelings on this situation. I think he has given Netanyahu much too much room at this point. If the Israeli military establishment felt that American armaments were actually at risk, that would be calculus changing for them. I mean, we are, in a very important way, their armory. And Netanyahu has been stalling this out and has been defying the Biden administration functionally completely. I think that the support Biden offered early on was important and needed, and there was a pivot that needed to be made at some point that he didn't fully make.
34:03 Ezra Klein? And one consequence of that is that we have completely lost credibility with Palestinians. We are considered completely on the Israeli side of this and not a credible broker at all. And maybe that's fine, because maybe other Arab states would be involved in this, right? When you talk about that kind of solution. But if America is going to be the country that sort of brings us together, you probably need a president who is viewed with somewhat more trust and viewed as somewhat more fundamentally sympathetic by the Palestinian side. And I think for where this now is and where it's going,
34:44 Ezra Klein? Harris is presenting herself, and I don't mean this politically, I think substantively, as more credible, not in a way that Israel might like. But there's not going to be a deal that only Israel likes.
34:58 Aaron Retica? I was hinting earlier at the question of what is the imagined electorate of this speech? This race is very, very close, right? The enthusiasm for Harris has brought it back to parity. It hasn't made, I mean, maybe she's ahead in some places where Trump was ahead before, but it's nothing like a slam dunk that she's going to win, far from it. I guess I'm also wondering how you think the speech reflects how she sees the contest? You know, the real contest is in five to seven states, right?
35:38 Ezra Klein? Look, there's a theory, a long running theory of the election. I think I associate with Michael Podhoretz, or the former AFLCIO political director, that there is a MAGA coalition and an anti-MAGA coalition.
35:53 Ezra Klein? And the anti-MAGA coalition is a set of factions, it's bigger than the Democratic Party, that in the right circumstances, has come together to beat back MAGA candidates. They beat back all kinds of Senate candidates and gubernatorial candidates, and in 2020, they beat Donald Trump. And I think this was a speech that reflected that theory of politics, right? There are other theories of politics right now. Bernie Sanders' theory of politics, for instance, is you beat Donald Trump's fake economic populism with real economic populism. You make bigger, bolder, stronger promises. You make him out to be a liar and a cheat and a billionaire, right?
36:38 Ezra Klein? Like a guy on the side of the billionaires because he has won himself, or claims to be, or whatever. There are all kinds of theories of this, but Harris' theory was quite clearly making herself a safe harbor for a very large coalition. So I think she has confidence she's going to hold most of the Democratic Party with her. And to the extent that we kind of saw the way she's thinking about this election, I think that the speakers who came before her, including going a little bit further back in the night, Mark Kelly and Gabby Giffords, and the thing she's emphasizing is about being a safe harbor for this political tendency to reassemble, possibly enlarge, but definitely reassemble, a coalition that has won in American politics before.
37:21 Ezra Klein? This was not, to me, a hope and change speech. This was, I mean, she does talk about, we're not going back, you know, we're going forward. But we're not going back is to Trump. And forward is honestly not exactly clear. In many ways, this was very similar to Joe Biden's theory of politics here. She's just able to prosecute that case, no callback to her language intended, in a way he just no longer had the capability to do. When she made the arguments about Trump on January 6th, when she made the arguments about his self-dealing, when she made the arguments about abortion, they're not different substantially than arguments he's been making. She's just able to make them much better.
38:05 Ezra Klein? And so in this way, I mean, I've talked a lot over these past couple of dispatches about different, you know, torches being passed to the Democratic Party, but she was a very strong inheritor of Bidenism here.
38:17 Aaron Retica? One thing she did do tonight, even though she didn't push hard on the part of her biography with her father, she did talk about him saying that she should run free, which I thought was interesting. But she did seed in all these little things. She mentioned Aretha Franklin. She mentioned John Coltrane. She mentioned Miles Davis. She mentioned Thurgood Marshall. And for the aficionados, she mentioned Constance Speaker-Malley, the last two of whom were instrumental in all kinds of civil rights cases. So the stuff was there, right? But it wasn't highlighted. But one of the things that was very interesting about this whole convention, if we're looking
38:59 Aaron Retica? at the whole thing, is, and the daughter spoke tonight, Nell Emhoff, and then two days ago, Doug Emhoff spoke. Do you see any fundamental differences in the way all of these things are being approached, whether it's the women's roles, the men's roles, the way families were presented, the way the mixed family, the blended family, like any of that in a way?
39:23 Ezra Klein? I thought the family presentations were really touching, right? I'm not going to talk about their politics because I don't think they're fundamentally political. I loved Doug's speech. I thought it was charming. And in terms of contrasts, try to imagine Melania Trump offering that kind of speech about Donald Trump. I don't know that I thought any moment in the convention is more moving to me than Gus Walz's
39:49 Aaron Retica? Oh, man.
39:51 Ezra Klein? tears and joy, and then later his embrace of his father. These families seem to love each other. And it's not an unknown thing in politics, but it's just, it's quite lovely. I think in terms of the presentation that Harris is offering, one thing she's able to do, that Obama was able to do before her, that Hillary Clinton, in a funny way, was not able to do, was Harris is able to let who she is, but also how she is, speak very loudly. And that then allows her to generate an enthusiasm that means she doesn't have to say other things quite so explicitly.
40:33 Ezra Klein? Hillary Clinton, following after Barack Obama and his charisma and his movement building, and having been in politics for a very long time, so simultaneously being this generationally historic figure, right, if she had won, and even just in winning the nomination. Nevertheless, like, she had to go quite a bit further left than Obama did in kind of making explicit arguments that he made implicitly, or frankly, didn't make at all. And she would talk very explicitly about systemic racism, and, you know, "I'm with her" was the slogan. And, you know, everything was sort of trying to remind you that there was something you were supposed to be excited about, right? This was something we'd never seen before.
41:16 Ezra Klein? And Harris is more in the line of what Obama was able to do, which is people have gotten very excited about her. It's her performance, it's her style, it's who she is, it is Doug. But because that excitement has emerged organically, it gives her a lot of room to make other political moves. This is also room Obama took. And it allows her to allow the enthusiasm to be about her. And so she doesn't have to make a ton of promises that might turn off other kinds of voters. There's a sort of implicit contract being drawn up between her and her base right now,
42:00 Ezra Klein? which is, "You let me do what I need to do to win over the voters I need to win over to beat Donald Trump, and then we'll do this thing, this governing together."
42:12 Aaron Retica? Well, that seems like a very good place to end. Ezra, thanks so much for staying up with me to talk about all this.
42:21 Ezra Klein? Yeah, Aaron, thank you for being here, but it's now almost 1 a.m.
42:25 Aaron Retica? We have an ongoing conversation, but it doesn't usually quite go this late.
42:31 Ezra Klein? And thank you to the whole team who has worked incredibly hard to put out all of these episodes across the Democratic Convention week.
42:48 Ezra Klein? This episode of The Ezra Klein Show was produced by Claire Gordon, fact checking by Michelle Harris with Jack McCordick. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Andy Galvin, Roland Hu, Elias Isquith, and Kristin Lynn. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Christina Sami-Lusky and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Andrew Ostrasser, and special thanks to Sonia Herrero and of course to Aaron Reddick for joining me.
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